Cutie Stories: October 2012

Hippolyte-Adolphe Taine

Hippolyte-Adolphe Taine was a philosopher, psychologist, historian, and critic. Taine and Ernest Renan were the leading French positivistic thinkers of the second half of the nineteenth century. As a result of Taine’s great independence of mind, his life was not always comfortable. Discriminatory treatment from the authorities of the Second Empire led to his withdrawal from teaching from 1852 to 1863, when he was appointed an examiner at Saint-Cyr.

The next year he became a lecturer at the École des Beaux Arts; from his lectures there came his famous Philosophie de l’art, At the intervention of the Catholic clergy, a French Academy award for his Histoire de la littérature anglaise was denied him, and he was elected to the academy only in 1878, after the fall of the Second Empire. By that time he had antagonized both liberals and Bonapartists by his ruthless destruction of the revolutionary and Napoleonic legends.

Nevertheless, his influence was great and diversified. His positivistic and physiological approach to psychology was adopted by Théodule Ribot, Pierre Janet, and others, and his opposition to centralization and to revolutionary experiments attracted Catholic traditionalists such as Paul Bourget and Maurice Barrès, who, however, ignored his severe condemnation of the old regime and his outspoken sympathies for Protestant and parliamentary England.

Alfred Tarski

Alfred Tarski

Alfred Tarski, the Polish-American mathematician and logician, was born in Warsaw, received his doctorate in mathematics from the University of Warsaw in 1924, and two years later was named docent. In 1939 he emigrated to the United States.

Appointed lecturer in mathematics at the University of California (Berkeley) in 1942, he remained at that institution for the rest of his life, serving as professor of mathematics from 1946 and becoming professor emeritus in 1968.

Mathematics

Tarski worked in both pure mathematics, especially set theory and algebra, and mathematical logic, especially metamathematics.

Johannes Tauler

Johannes Tauler

The German mystic Johannes Tauler entered the Dominican order at Strasbourg about the age of fifteen and probably studied in the Dominican studium generale at Cologne, where he may have been taught by Meister Eckhart. He was certainly influenced by the latter and by the contemplative movement known as the Gottesfreunde (Friends of God).

He was in Strasbourg at the time of Pope Innocent XXII’s interdict on the city for taking the wrong side in the war between different sections of the Holy Roman Empire, but there is no good evidence for the story that during the Black Death he defied the interdict by administering sacraments to the dying. He remained a loyal and orthodox member of the church.

Much legendary material surrounds his life, and various spurious works are attributed to him. It was on the basis of these sources that some earlier scholars mistakenly thought of Tauler as a precursor of the Reformation.

Alfred Edward Taylor

Alfred Edward Taylor, the British philosopher, was born at Oundle, Northamptonshire, and educated at New College, Oxford. His teaching experience was unusually varied: He was a fellow of Merton College, Oxford, 1891–1898; lecturer at Owens College, Manchester, 1898–1903; professor of logic and metaphysics at McGill University, Montreal, 1903–1908; professor of moral philosophy at St. Andrews University, 1908–1924; and professor of moral philosophy at Edinburgh, 1924–1941.

His interests were also varied; not only was he an authority on Greek philosophy but he also made extensive contributions to current thinking on ethics, metaphysics, and the philosophy of religion.

Taylor’s thought was within the tradition of British neo-Hegelianism, but as his philosophy developed, other influences came in also, though he remained firmly attached to a theistic and spiritualist interpretation of reality.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the paleoanthropologist and Roman Catholic priest who advocated a doctrine of cosmic evolution, was born in Sarcenat, France.

At the age of eighteen he entered the Jesuit order, and he remained a faithful member of it for the rest of his life. By the time he was ordained, his interest in science and the reading of Henri Bergson resulted in his becoming a fervent evolutionist.

Association with the Bergsonian scholar Édouard Le Roy also deeply influenced his thought. It became one of Teilhard’s aims to show that evolutionism does not entail a rejection of Christianity.

Teleological Argument for the Existence of God

The “Teleological Argument for the existence of God” is a member of the classic triad of arguments, which is completed by the Ontological Argument and the Cosmological Argument. Stated most succinctly, it runs:

The world exhibits teleological order (design, adaptation).
Therefore, it was produced by an intelligent designer.

To understand this argument, we must first understand what teleological order is.

Teleological Order

Generally speaking, to say that a group of elements is ordered in a certain way is to say that they are interrelated so as to form a definite pattern, but the notion of a definite pattern is vague. Any set of elements is interrelated in one way rather than another, and any complex of interrelations might be construed by someone as a definite pattern.

Teleological Ethics

Teleological Ethics

Theories about what is right and wrong are standardly divided into two kinds: those that are teleological and those that are not. Teleological theories are ones that first identify what is good in states of affairs and then characterize right acts entirely in terms of that good.

The paradigm case of a teleological theory is therefore an impartial consequentialist theory, such as hedonistic utilitarianism; defended by John Stuart Mill (1969) and Henry Sidgwick (1907), it says the right act is always the one whose consequences contain the greatest total pleasure possible.

But the category of teleological ethics is normally thought to be broader than that of consequentialism, so there can be teleological theories that are not consequentialist. This can be so, however, in several different ways.

Teleology

The term teleology locates a series of connected philosophical questions. If we grant that there is such a thing as purposive or goal-directed activity (as we must, since, for example, a political campaign aimed at victory represents a clear, uncontroversial case), we may ask the following questions:

By what criteria do we identify purposive activity?
What is the nature of the systems that exhibit purposive activity?
Does the nature of purposive activity require us to employ special concepts or special patterns of description and explanation that are not needed in an account of nonpurposive activity? And if we grant that there are objects and processes which perform functions (again, as we must, since no one would deny, for instance, that the human kidney performs the function of excretion), we may ask:
By what criteria do we identify functions?
What is the nature of the systems that exhibit functional activity?
Does the description of functions require special concepts or special patterns of analysis?

Bernardino Telesio

Bernardino Telesio, the Renaissance philosopher, was born at Cosenza, in Calabria, Italy. He studied philosophy, physics, and mathematics at the University of Padua, and received his doctorate in 1535. In Padua he became acquainted with the teaching of Aristotle and the two main Aristotelian schools, the Averroistic and the Alexandrist.

Following the trend of the time, he devoted himself especially to the study of nature; but far from accepting the Aristotelian doctrine, he reacted vigorously against it. Telesio pursued his literary activity mostly at Naples, where he was a guest of the Carafa family, and at Cosenza.

He enjoyed the friendship of several popes, and Gregory XIII invited him to Rome to expound his doctrine. He never engaged in any formal teaching, for he preferred to discuss his ideas in private conversations with friends.

Testimony

testimony

The term testimony in contemporary analytic philosophy is used as label for the spoken or written word, when this purports to pass on the speaker’s or writer’s knowledge, conveying factual information or other truth.

Testifying, or giving testimony, is a linguistic action, and testimony is its result, an audible speech act of telling or more extended discourse (perhaps recorded), or a legible written text. Interest in the topic has grown rapidly since the publication of C. A. J. Coady’s Testimony: A Philosophical Study (1992).

Testimony in this broad sense includes the central case of one person telling something to another in face-to-face communication, as well as a range of other cases, from public lectures, television and radio broadcasts, and newspapers to personal letters and e-mails, all kinds of purportedly factual books and other publications, and the information recorded in train timetables, birth registers, and official records of many kinds.